D-003 - Assurance for IT and Digital Projects
Independent reviews of projects range from a desktop review to more in-depth reviews, including interviews with project team members and key project stakeholders. A typical project health check review will take 5-10 days at the client’s premises or can be conducted remotely as required.
Introduction
To achieve delivery excellence, projects must produce outcomes that are aligned with the expectations of stakeholders. Projects are required to consistently deliver on time, on budget and in line with quality expectations.
To help project managers ensure delivery quality and manage project risk, assurance activities need to be embedded into project plans. EEE can work with project managers to embed assurance activities into their project delivery.
EEE also conducts independent project reviews within their assurance portfolio. These reviews will verify that assurance activities have been included in the project plan
Assurance overview
The design of assurance activities should provide an appropriate level of rigour and discipline whilst also aiming to moderate any burden for projects. Assurance activities need to be scalable and tailored to project size, criticality, complexity, degree of business change and level of risk.
- Assurance activities focus on deliverables within three primary areas:
Project Assurance – ensuring the project is well defined, appropriately resourced and steered in order to realise desired business benefits. - Solution Assurance – ensuring the quality and relevance of the solution being delivered meets stakeholder needs and project objectives.
- Stage Gates – ensuring a controlled progression through the delivery lifecycle based on entry and exit criteria within project stages.
Benefits of assurance embedded in projects
Assurance activities enable projects to be:
- Value adding – focused on helping project teams to assure both delivery predictability (schedule, cost) and quality (alignment to stakeholder needs and expectations).
- Proactive and participative – not based exclusively on reactive (after action) reviews.
- Integrated – improve stakeholder alignment to reduce multiple stakeholder engagements.
- Scalable – they can be modified in line with project scale, risk and criticality.
Benefits of independent project reviews
Independent project reviews enable an unbiased, assessment of the project’s progress and status, as well as provide recommendations for required improvements. EEE conduct a range of reviews, including Value-Assurance Reviews (VARs), Project Health Checks and Stage Gate Reviews.
Reviews will expect to:
- Identify issues before they occur.
- Overcome current challenges and risks.
- Confirm that the project is still relevant and clearly understood by the team.
- Verify that assurance is embedded in the project and it is following established practices and processes to ensure quality outputs.
Review output
At the conclusion of a project review, the output will be a Report, incorporating:
- Executive summary
- Project overview (background, status, outlook)
- Observations (compliance and best practice)
- Concerns
- Recommendations
Review duration
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